The 'Terrible Beauty' of Easter, 1916

Published: March 31, 1991

In Dublin 75 years ago, a tiny army of Irish rebels and patriots took possession of the main post office. There, on Easter Monday, they proclaimed the birth of an Irish Republic and the end of England's imperial rule. The rising was quixotic, had little support and was swiftly put down. Yet with vengeful ferocity, the British ordered the execution, one by one, of 15 rebel leaders, including a trade unionist, suffering from gangrened wounds, who had to be propped up to be shot.

When the grisly business was done, William Butler Yeats wrote, Ireland had "changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born." The victims themselves sensed that theirs was a blood sacrifice that presaged rebirth and renewal, that their deaths might some day be seen as the secular incarnation of a sacred season. But the Easter Rising also proved to be a dress rehearsal for much good and ill that lay ahead as empires fell and ordinary people entered history.

After the rebellion came martial law, and then a two-year guerrilla war fought without quarter in city and countryside. Rebels formed an underground army, Britain recruited a tough supplementary force, the Black and Tans, so called for their khaki tunics and black trousers. The burnings, killings, raids and reprisals reached a climax on Bloody Sunday, Nov. 21, 1920, when British troops fired indiscriminately at a soccer crowd, killing a dozen and wounding scores.

In 1921 Britain compromised with Irish rebels, the first step in imperial retreat. A treaty was signed creating an Irish Free State as a self-governing dominion, but also giving predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland the right to remain part of Britain. After a bitter civil war in the new Free State, the bloodletting ended as an exhausted Ireland turned to Eamon de Valera, the sole surviving commander in the Easter Rising, whose death sentence had been commuted. Later, Dublin's remaining ties to the British Crown were scrapped, and the Republic of Ireland was proclaimed.

It was a cycle that would be repeated with variations in half a hundred colonies: rebellion and repression, martyrs and massacres, victory and partition, civil war and the emergence of a single strong leader who had once been held in a colonial prison. And yet, it might be sadly added, those who have suffered denial of rights too often close their own hearts and minds to others who are desperate to preserve their own birthright -- like Irish Protestants in Northern Ireland.

Now that old Western empires have gone, and their Communist successor has crumbled, one can look back with awe at the small band of teachers, poets and trade unionists who rose up for Ireland. In a real sense, we live in the world they helped bring into being in a season of Christian sacrifice and ascension, in 1916.